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team of researchers at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University believes they have solved the mystery of why warm water freezes faster than cooler water. It has to do with the way energy is stored in the hydrogen bonds between water molecules they suggest in their paper which they've uploaded to the preprint server arXiv.

The researchers demonstrate that the Mpemba paradox arises intrinsically from the release rate of energy initially stored in the covalent H-O part of the O:H-O bond in water albeit experimental conditions. Generally, heating raises the energy of a substance by lengthening and softening all bonds involved. However, the O:H nonbond in water follows actively the general rule of thermal expansion and drives the H-O covalent bond to relax oppositely in length and energy because of the inter-electron-electron pair coupling [J Phys Chem Lett 4, 2565 (2013); ibid 4, 3238 (2013)].

Heating stores energy into the H-O bond by shortening and stiffening it. Cooling the water as the source in a refrigerator as a drain, the H-O bond releases its energy at a rate that depends exponentially on the initially storage of energy, and therefore, Mpemba effect happens.

This effect is formulated in terms of the relaxation time tau to represent all possible processes of energy loss. Consistency between predictions and measurements revealed that the tau drops exponentially intrinsically with the initial temperature of the water being cooled.

Astronomers using XMM-Newton have discovered, for the first time, a pair of supermassive black holes in orbit around one another in an ordinary looking galaxy.

Most massive galaxies in the Universe are thought to harbor at least one supermassive black hole at their center. Two supermassive black holes are the smoking gun that the galaxy has merged with another. Thus, finding binary supermassive black holes can tell astronomers about how galaxies evolved into their present-day shapes and sizes.

To date, only a few candidates for close binary supermassive black holes have been found. All are in active galaxies where they are constantly ripping gas clouds apart, in the prelude to crushing them out of existence. In the process of destruction, the gas is heated so much that it shines at many wavelengths, including X-rays. This gives the galaxy an unusually bright centre, and leads to it being called active.

On 10 June 2010, Dr Fukun Liu from Peking University in China with colleagues spotted a tidal disruption event in the galaxy SDSS J120136.02+300305.5 (J120136 for short). They were scanning the data for such events and scheduled follow-up observations just days later with XMM-Newton and NASA’s Swift satellite.

The galaxy was still spilling X-rays into space. It looked exactly like a tidal disruption event caused by a supermassive black hole but as they tracked the slowly fading emission day after day something strange happened. The X-rays fell below detectable levels between days 27 and 48 after the discovery. Then they re-appeared and continued to follow a more expected fading rate, as if nothing had happened.

“This is exactly what you would expect from a pair of supermassive black holes orbiting one another,” said Dr Liu, who is the lead author of the study published in the Astrophysical Journal (arXiv.org version). Dr Liu found that two possible configurations were possible to reproduce the observations of J120136.

In the first, the primary black hole contained 10 million solar masses and was orbited by a black hole of about a million solar masses in an elliptical orbit. In the second solution, the primary black hole was about a million solar masses and in a circular orbit. In both cases, the separation between the black holes was relatively small – about 2 thousandths of a light year. This is about the width of our Solar System.

The image, showing a ghostly oval shape with trailing white tendrils, is not, of course, Scotland's famous lake monster, but the sighting does highlight why satellite images can easily fool the untrained eye.

Scientists using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) have learned what the weather is like on the surface of one of the objects in the system Luhman 16AB.

Brown dwarfs are substellar bodies more massive than planets but not massive enough to initiate the sustained hydrogen fusion that powers self-luminous stars.1, 2 They are born hot and slowly cool as they age. Once they cool below about 2,300 degrees kelvin, liquid or crystalline particles composed of calcium aluminates, silicates and iron condense into atmospheric ‘dust’3, 4, which disappears at still cooler temperatures (around 1,300 degrees kelvin)5, 6. Models to explain this dust dispersal include both an abrupt sinking of the entire cloud deck into the deep, unobservable atmosphere5, 7 and breakup of the cloud into scattered patches6, 8 (as seen on Jupiter and Saturn9). However, hitherto observations of brown dwarfs have been limited to globally integrated measurements10, which can reveal surface inhomogeneities but cannot unambiguously resolve surface features11. Astronomers from Germany, France and the United Kingdom now report a two-dimensional map of a brown dwarf’s surface that allows identification of large-scale bright and dark features, indicative of patchy clouds. Monitoring suggests that the characteristic timescale for the evolution of global weather patterns is approximately one day.

The cryogenic high-resolution infrared echelle spectrograph (CRIRES) on the telescope allowed the team to see the changing brightness as Luhman 16B rotated and whether dark and light features were moving away from, or towards the observer.

By combining all the results they could recreate a map of the dark and light patches of the surface. “Previous observations suggested that brown dwarfs might have mottled surfaces, but now we can actually map them,” said Dr. Ian Crossfield of Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg. “Soon, we will be able to watch cloud patterns form, evolve, and dissipate on this brown dwarf – eventually, exometeorologists may be able to predict whether a visitor to Luhman 16B could expect clear or cloudy skies,” he said.

For years, people have reported odd glowing and mysterious flickers of light before an earthquake. Now the phenomenon may finally be explained, in a new study that explores the unusual geology of the earthquakes associated with these sightings.

THE FINAL SHOW - FRIDAY NIGHT PARANORMAL SHOW Join Mickey Gocool, Kurt Logsdon & guests for the FINAL friday night paranormal show. Kurt & I will be talking about some of the best bits of the FRIDAY NIGHT PARANORMAL SHOW.

SPRO's insight:

Always a cracking show, listen in for their final one. Going to miss listening in!

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